INVENT Press Release
The fact that the HYPERMIX®-Agitator has an excellent design was verified with the Red Dot Award 2021. More importantly, however, is just how well it works and how often it is used – as recently at a production facility of the renowned wine and juice producer García Carrión in Segorbe in eastern Spain.
The tradition of the innovative producer from Castellón province, where the Don Simón brand has become the best-selling Spanish wine in the world, is 130 years old. The producer’s line of products also includes juices, smoothies and soups, especially gazpacho. The Iberian Peninsula experiences increasing periods of water shortages from April to September, which particularly affects public utilities. All these years, García Carrión has also relied on a reliable supply of drinking water from the public network, until the volume of water it consumed exceeded the volume supplied. Nowadays, the producer needs three times more water in the summer months than the public supplier can deliver during that period.
To ensure the water supply for the production plant, García Carrión purchased two large tanks each with a holding capacity of 18,300 m³. In the meantime, five of the HYPERMIX®-Agitators are in use in the tanks to prevent temperature stratification of the stored water and, consequently, post-germination and algae formation. In addition, continuous mixing ensures that a metered disinfectant is evenly distributed in the water.
Extensive simulations and test procedures before and after installation
After the last vintage was completed, the order from Spain arrived at our offices. Before the HYPERMIX®-Agitators could be delivered ready for use, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations were first conducted to confirm the required quantity and positioning of the agitators given the complexity and size of the tanks. Because the tanks have the same volume but are shaped differently, three agitators proved to be optimal for one tank and only two for the other.
In a next step, they were assembled from the individual components (agitator, drive, lifting cables, connection cable including protective hose, frame and small parts) at INVENT in Erlangen and then tested. The frequency converters used to control the agitators were also configured. Prepared so well, the following spring, the customers in Spain were able to install the five HYPERMIX®-Agitators in their tanks themselves. In mid-June, two of our employees set off for Segorbe to test the agitators in operation. Since then, the units have been working perfectly to everyone’s satisfaction.